Pikes were used much the same way right? Surprised I never put the two together, ancient humans weren’t stupid so of course they’d realize that was a better way of causing harm than just throwing it. Not to mention their use of leverage in weapons like the Atlatl. No clue on the timespan of these things but I do find this stuff interesting.
The Clovis period was around 12,000 years ago in North America.
Makes sense, use the prey’s weight and momentum to do the hard work, rather than the relativly feable arm of a much smaller creature!
Many people have a silly idea in their heads that stone-age humans could not be as innovative and smart as we can because their technology was less advanced than ours.
They also look at an expertly-knapped spearhead like the ones in the thumbnail and think they could do that with a couple of rocks they find in their backyard.
These ancestors of ours were smart, they were creative thinkers, they made stone tools at an expert level that the average person today could not even hope to replicate. I love finding out new ways they were able to innovate.
Modern society has existed in a flash on an evolutionary timescale, it’s likely that our ancient ancestors were exactly as “smart” as we are
If they were so smart how come they’re dead?
To be fair I can’t fathom the size of balls you need to have, to stand behind a spear while a Mammoth is charging you down.
i remember reading how eskimos would wrap sharp bone fragments in balls of fat and leave them for polar bears… then they would follow the bears until they died of internal bleeding.
elephants are much smarter than bears though.
Brutal
that is such a grimy way to hunt lol. basically poisoning without the risk eating the meat
It’s the arctic and a polar bear. Is it fair? Well it’s about as fair as fishing. And if they don’t do either they’ll see how fair starving on a block of ice is
Maybe people shouldn’t be living there if they can’t survive without poisoning their prey
Wow, please tell me you’re trolling
The same reason people shouldn’t be living in Arizona and expecting other states to divert their water to them. There is no water there you shouldn’t live there. No one is forcing anyone to live there
Just live in a habitable climate there are so many. Just live in a biome with plentiful game, there are many
The Inuit/Eskimos are some of the more self-sustaining peoples on the planet. They don’t depend much on imports from elsewhere, at least not to my knowledge. They had to figure out many adaptations for the area but they make it work and have done so for a long time.
To compare them with a city representing the pinnacle of mankind’s hubris is a bit of a reach imo
I always pictured mammoths being more docile: disinclined to charge. Didn’t realize they could be more of a wooly bully.
Elephants charge pretty easily, so that part doesn’t surprise me.
I did that thing where I lied on the internet. The preamble was there purely as a setup for the greatest joke of all time.
Worth
Yeah, if your main form of offense/defense is that you are: large, and have massive fuck-off tusks on your front then charging seems to be a pretty good go to.
Wooly bully?
Watch it now, watch it!
I would be surprised if they didn’t use pitfall traps with spikes. That’s how I would take down an elephant
I believe that’s a tiger trap
Prehistoric lego.
The grooves carved into each point could allow it to slide down the shaft upon impact. A fixed point, by contrast, would be more likely to shatter when it hit dense material, especially bone.
This is really interesting. And to further illustrate just how much we have no idea and might be wildly wrong, there’s an incredible book, All Yesterdays, which reimagines prehistoric animals in interesting new ways. The second half of the book shows possible recreations of contemporary animals based solely on their skeletons to really drive home the point at how much guessing is involved in this field. Some of the images can be found here.
This is a rhino skeleton (wtf):
We do know a lot more about mammoths though, because they have been found frozen in good condition in Siberia.
Prehistoric Minecraft Automatic Mob Farm.
Fuckin bullshit. I’ve seen the cave paintings - they were throwing those fuckers
It was the first Olympic sport…run from.the Mammoth
Isnt this how you would hunt boar too?
Could you just imagine killing an animal that size with a big stick? I’d tell everyone I met, probably multiple times.
So if the theory is that spears were planted in the ground rather than thrown, that means there was probably a ton of them in the ground and mammoths were chased into the trap.
Planted in the ground could mean that they were left free standing or that they held the backend against the ground whilst holding onto it still.
